Page 22 of Installment Immortality

“I see.”

“And Artie… whew.” The mouse grabbed its tail, wringing it between its paws. “He’s not well. He’s not mad, because he doesn’t know how to be. He’s not grieving, either, which just makes Elsie angrier, which makes her feel terrible, because she doesn’t want to be mad at him for things he can’t control. Whatever Sarah did to rebuild him as a person, it wasn’t good enough, and it’s coming apart at the seams. If she was willing to come here and perform continuous maintenance, that might have been enough, but she’s not, and he’s unraveling. He knows less about who he’s supposed to be every day. His clergy is discussing a liturgical renaming.”

“Really?”

Formal liturgical renamings happened when a god or priestess had drifted so far from their original title that it no longer fit at all, or when they died. Some gods would have multiple lesser titles, but one would always be the “correct” method of referring to them, the specific title that defined them in Aeslin theology. Asfar as I knew, only two full liturgical renamings of the living had been performed since the mice started worshipping the family: Alice, who got a new name when she began her quest for Thomas and could no longer be considered the woman she’d been before that, and the man who’d been married to Beth Evans, who was known to the mice as the Kindly Priestess. Presumably, he’d had a proper title before he decided to hit her so hard that she died from her injuries, but after that, the mice had renamed him to “the Cruelest God,” and intentionally forgotten his name, as well as any other titles he might have borne.

For them to rename someone was for them to effectively declare the person they’d been before dead and gone. Alice’s clergy was still split on whether she could return to her original title now that her long quest was finished: it seemed likely that she would always have two distinct liturgical lines going forward.

“Really,” confirmed the mouse.

“Poor kiddo. Either one of them home?”

The mouse nodded. “Yes—is that enough Plain Text Accounting?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Thank you, Priestess,” said the mouse, with evident relief. “The Polychromatic Priestess is not presently in Residence. She has gone to attend the Derby of Rolling, and to Drown her Sorrows in the eyes of pretty girls. The God of Chosen Isolation is Isolated in his Chambers. He last ventured forth at the hour of dinner three days gone, and has not been Seen since.”

“That sounds like a job for a babysitter,” I said, pushing away from the desk. I nodded to the mouse. “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.”

It fanned its whiskers at me. “I am Honored by your Conversation.”

“Glad you think so,” I said, and dropped through the floor. I’ve never been sure how to end a conversation with the mice when I’mnot bribing them to go away and leave me alone; getting the hell out of whatever room they’re in works as well as anything else.

Besides, dropping through floors is fun. You see all sorts of interesting things. Mostly pipes and electrical wires and dead beetles, but those are interesting if you look at them the right way.

I passed cleanly through the stairway to the ground floor, rolled my shoulders, and kept going.

Dropping through that much empty space wasn’t difficult or painful, but it was disorienting. Being a physical haunting means spending most of my time behaving as if I still have a body, as if I need to interact with the physical world in more than a superficial way, and living people don’t usually fall through floors, and when they do, they tend to plummet. I didn’t plummet from the second floor to the first—it was more like I drifted down, light as a feather, moving at the pace of the air.

Then I passed through the floor of the first story, and into the transformed confines of Artie’s basement.

Like the rooms of all “my” kids, the basement was a familiar space. I had watched its evolution from a barren storage space to the more comfortable, well-appointed space that he had turned it into after he was given permission to relocate. And indeed, parts of the room were the way I expected them to be. The carpet, for example, hadn’t changed, and neither had the bed. But the rest of the space was unnervingly divergent from my memory.

The walls were blank, posters, sketches, and pictures taken down to reveal the cold concrete beneath. The shelves were empty, books and comics and action figures gone. A pile of cardboard boxes against the wall next to the washing machine told me where at least some of them had gone. The desk was still in its customary place, computer turned on and quietly hummingaway to itself, but Artie was on his back on the bed, hands folded behind his head, staring unblinking at the ceiling.

Somehow, he didn’t appear to have noticed me. That, or he was so busy counting the cracks in the ceiling that he couldn’t spare a glance my way. It didn’t really matter. I walked in his direction, giving him ample time to realize I was there before I cleared my throat and said, “Hey, Art.” He’d been going by “Arthur” the last time I’d seen him, but the mice were calling him Artie. I wasn’t sure what he preferred right now.

“Arthur,” he said, eyes still on the ceiling.

“Come again?”

“Mynameis Arthur. Not Art, and not Artie. Artie was someone else. I don’t want to use his name. I don’t like it when people call me that. It makes me sad and angry and I wish people would stop. I keep asking and asking them to stop, and they do it anyway, and it’s notfair.” He finally turned in my direction, eyes burning with quietly focused anger. “Hello, Mary. I thought you were dead. Again.”

“Not quite,” I said. “I took a hard-enough hit that it scattered me across the afterlife, but I’ve reconstituted.”

Too late, I realized that was a lot like what had happened to him, although my situation had come with a happier ending—I was still myself, at least as far as I could tell, and not an amalgam of other people’s ideas about me.

Artie—Arthur—scowled. “How nice for you,” he said, and sat up. “Why are you here?”

“You remember the anima mundi?”

“Living spirit of the earth, took the place of the crossroads after Annie went and made it so they never existed.”

“Well, it turns out they’re basically the boss of all the ghosts in the world. Most of them, they leave to go about their business, because they’re locked in to the rules of straightforward, defined hauntings, which means they aren’t running around, getting intotrouble. I, on the other hand, was defined by a haunting that no longer exists, and managed to sort of wedge my way into a different sort of haunt by coming at it sideways. So right now, I don’t have well-defined rules or a job that I’m expected to be doing.”

“Meaning?”

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